Aliens Colonial Marines is the latest installment in the Aliens franchise and almost everybody keeps saying that this game sucks.

While this game ain’t no king of the year (2013), it’s not that bad either. The majority of gamers who played this game criticized it for being too short and for its bad graphics. Others criticized it for not being “horror enough”.

Indeed, the game is short and its graphics aren’t impressive at all. For a 2013 game, the graphics were those of a game from 2008-2009. The graphics look almost identical if not even weaker to those of Aliens Vs Predator 3, a game released in 2010. Both of these games were published by SEGA but they were built by different developers. Aliens Vs Predator 2010 was built by Rebellion and Aliens Colonial Marines was built by Gearbox Software.

Aliens vs. Predator’s graphics were so good back in 2010 that most of the internet websites performing graphics card benchmarks, tested their cards on a few games and amongst them was Aliens vs. Predator even though worldwide, there are hundreds of games released every year.

Aliens vs. Predator 2010 was also considerably longer than Aliens Colonial Marines. For those familiar with Aliens vs. Predator, you can play 3 campaigns, as a Marine, an Alien and a Predator. Each campaign can last for a few hours depending on your gaming style. Consider the Aliens Colonial Marines’s main campaign as long as Aliens vs. Predator’s Marine Campaign. Yeah, it’s that short! Aliens vs. Predator was 3 times longer than Aliens Colonial Marines without any DLC to expand the singleplayer campaign.

However in July 2013 SEGA released some DLCs for Aliens Colonial Marines and among them was the Stasis Interrupted which brought a new campaign into the game. That was a good addition for this shot game.

It’s worth to note that the Alien drones in Aliens Vs Predator 2010 made some sort of stupid felidae-like sounds while in Aliens Colonial Marines their sounds were those used typically with the entire Aliens series.

Horror and toughness

The good part is that Aliens Colonial Marines was a little more challenging than Aliens vs. Predator. For me, Aliens vs. Predator was too easy, however it was also a little more spiced up, more gore and more horror. Especially when playing as an Alien or a Predator and performing fatalities.

In Aliens vs. Predator there was this Predalien dude called (The Abomination) which I met in my Marine campaign… really easy to kill with the Shotgun’s secondary fire (2 shells at the same time). However in Aliens Colonial Marines there were these Xeno Crushers similar to the Praetorians which were charging forward with their invulnerable head shields, really hard to kill… The only way to kill those creatures was to trick them by flanking them, running around rocks, cars and then shooting them from the side instead of shooting them in their head. Even the damn queen fight was much more challenging in Aliens Colonial Marines than in Aliens vs. Predator.

In Aliens vs. Predator all you had to do was to press a few buttons to fry the chained cockroach queen and that’s it… kind of stupid actually.

In Aliens Colonial Marines you also have to press a few buttons to release the cockroach queen into space but at least the queen is not chained, its free and it can catch you and kill you quite fast actually. You had to run around, hide from the free queen, but if you know what you have to do, the queen won’t get to you but she can still catch you while trying to push some buttons so you can throw the queen into out of space. Of course it was kind of dumb that the queen couldn’t get to you if you hid yourself into the double opened containers but at least there was some tension and trying to survive while in Aliens vs. Predator all you had to do was to push some buttons while fighting with a few pathetic easy to kill Xenomorph drones (the Aliens).

To some extent Aliens Colonial Marines kind of reminded us of Dead Space 3 with its dark theme, jumpy scenes and even weapon upgrades, an almost perfect game which unfortunately missed a few pieces here and there. One big horror advantage in Aliens Colonial Marines over Aliens Vs Predator was that our protagonist couldn’t shoot and hold his Motion Detector at the same time, having more surprise attacks that way.

There is not much to be said about this game, there is no need for a guide or tips and tricks as the game is really easy and short but that doesn’t mean that it was necessarily a bad game.

PROs:
+Cheap price
+Catchy
+Good storyline
+A good addition to the franchise
+Maybe even scary depending on your age and the number of horror games you’ve played in your life

CONs:
-Too short
-Too easy
-Bad graphics
-DLC as expensive as the game itself